Lonely Lion

”$10 / month” sounds pretty long-tail-y to me. That’s what I pay for Backpack. It’s a reasonable price for a great service. There’s a small number of similar-ish apps popping up here and there, all with slightly different takes on payment. The last one I ran across is from the Signals v. Noise weblog, called Giftbox. It’s a neat idea.

It just makes me wonder how many of these kinds of apps the market can realistically bear. I listened to the Basecamp IT conversations podcast, and was pretty inspired by the idea of building a simple app that somehow makes some small thing easier for some smallish group, however, I’m starting to wonder if the model will actually work for long. It certainly works if you’re 37signals and invent it, but for everyone else…I’m just not sure how many “do one thing really well” applications an individual is prepared to pay for.

One thing I like about these apps is the subscription model, instead of advertising. It makes it look cleaner, and it becomes an investment for you as a user. That said…you…reader…how much would you be willing to pay per month on these sorts of apps?

Currently, between my wife and I (both Backpack subscribers) we’re at $20 / month, plus $35 / year for Flickr. I think it’s realistic to say that we’d be willing to go to about $50 / month for these sorts of applications. That would buy us around two or three Backpack priced applications.

Hmmm.

I don’t have any answers. It will be interesting to watch this market develop…at some point I’m assuming that the number of available apps will outweigh the number of people willing to pay for them, and the market will eventually center itself around a handful of recognizable names. Which then sort of negates the whole concept that all this Web2.0 stuff is targeting.

One possible answer would be to start to target very specific markets with apps tailored to them. You’d limit your market, but could probably charge a bit more. Rather than being Flickr, and charging $35 / year, you could be “Flickr for bird watchers” and charge $5 / month.

Eh. It’s a lot of speculation.